Meyerson on TAP: What Pacific Century?

Last month, the axis of American commerce tilted from the West to the East. By “East,” I don’t mean China, Asia or, to resurrect a colonial exoticization, the Orient. I mean our East Coast instead of our West.

In August and September, The Wall Street Journal reports, the Port of New York/New Jersey was busier than the Port of Los Angeles for the first time since America’s corporate leaders discovered that employing cheap Chinese labor meant bigger American corporate profits.

It’s still too early to judge the implications of this shift. It may be that when the Chinese lockdowns end, Pacific trade will revert to its accustomed torrent. It may be that when Europe can tap its own energy resources, we will no longer be shipping them oceans of liquid natural gas.

But the rise in cross-Atlantic commerce isn’t just a rise in our exports of fossil fuel. Our imports from the EU and the UK have either matched or exceeded those from China for most of this year. And the number of our containers exported to Europe have also soared this year—and oil and gas don’t travel in containers.

With the rising tensions between China and the U.S, this shift could augur something more profound. If Europe does become our largest, or just more sizable, trading partner, that could mean the share of our goods made by significantly cheaper labor would diminish. Indeed, real compensation levels in Europe’s chief exporter, Germany, have considerably exceeded our own for many years. It would be nice to think that in the interest of trade harmonization, Europe and the U.S. could agree on joint labor standards, meaning that those in the U.S. would be compelled to rise. Our CEOs and conservatives would never permit that, of course, but it could serve as a nice leftwing talking point.

Even if the China-to-U.S. pipeline slows to a permanent trickle, that also doesn’t mean that the Pacific will be freighter-free. American corporations are already busily shifting production to factories in India and Vietnam. Which, in a sense, validates the long-forgotten Domino Theory, which supporters of our war on Vietnam invoked to argue that if Vietnam fell to the commies, so would all of Southeast Asia. It turns out that when the theory is shifted to describe the spread of participation in the sphere of global capitalism, it actually works quite well. As China has demonstrated, capitalist economics and Leninist (trending toward Stalinist) governance can go together very well.

In any event, here’s to our European sisters and brothers, and let’s hope that their labor practices and rights can at least inspire ours.